Last week I talked a bit about an article centering on why kids might be using social media as voraciously as they seemingly do. It was motivated by the book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, written by Microsoft researcher and ethnographer Danah Boyd.
Well, I can’t help but come back with just a little more. You see, in the course of digging into Ms. Boyd’s views on the subject, I came upon another set of her insights that I found very interesting. It was her take on kids and online privacy.
Now, if you’re thinking, “Kids these days don’t worry about privacy,” then you’re already heading in the right direction. An average adult will likely reason that if kids were concerned with privacy, they wouldn’t be tweeting out everything from their innermost dreams to where they’re going after school to the fact that they just had Fruit Loops for breakfast. Let’s face it, online discussion, shared pictures and other content is going to be public by default and it can only be private with a lot of effort.
Boyd, however, would say that the “kids don’t worry” part is a myth. She says that teens understand the public and private balance and they do indeed worry about privacy. However, it’s not so much the “my identity’s been stolen” type of worry that we might have, as much as it’s the “I can’t believe my mom is reading and commenting on my Facebook page” type.
So what are the teens doing? Well, the writer says that she found a growing trend in youthful online interactions: Rather than limit access to content, young people are limiting access to the posted content’s meaning.
Here’s how it works: Boyd tells a story of young girl who was separated from her friends but who had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed a little sympathy from her BFFs. The girl’s first thought is to share her misery through the lyrics of a favorite song, but then she realized that—uh oh—if she puts up some Emo song lyric, her mom will read it and probably think she’s suicidal.
So the girl gets around this mommy conundrum by posting the lyrics from an old movie she and her friends had seen together. She posts words from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” a seemingly cheery tune that plays during the crucifixion scene in the Monty Python comedy Life of Brian. (If you don’t know Monty Python, just trust me, it’s not a happy moment.) When her mom sees the post, she instantly texts, “It looks like you’re having a great day!” The girl’s friends, however, catch the true meaning and send their missives of support.
With this approach, only your real friends get the true meaning of things. It’s sort of a hidden code that Boyd says teens are almost instinctually developing in an effort to avoid prying eyes and hide in plain sight. Pig Latin for the digital set, if you will.
Now, perhaps you, dear reader, have been applying this kind of decoder ring thinking to all your online communiques for some time now. But I find it intriguing. And I plan to start scanning old Three Stooges shorts for ways to mask my credit information right away.
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